Bringing the Third Order of Order to the Second Order
The title for this post is deliberately a mouthful, recalling the mess that is physical metadata. However, there is a company, Tikitag, that is seeking to apply some principles of digital metadata to the physical world by selling cheap RFID tags and readers. The goal is for users to stick these inexpensive unique digital identifiers on their physical belongings, and to manage the information about them on their computers. RFID tags are being used increasingly in the retail space for inventory management, but until now their use in consumer applications has been fairly limited.
Engadget has a writeup of their coverage at DemoFall.